Back to school–how much do you know?

I cannot lie. I am friends with the author of this piece. (At least, I think I am, and hope she feels the same way.) That said, it’s a very good piece. Most Canadians would indeed fail an “abortion quiz.”

Now this topic doesn’t “just come up” very often (unless of course you socialize with me, and then it comes up more often than I am comfortable with. “What did you do today?” “I blogged…” “What’s your blog?” “Er, it’s a home decorating thing…” No, it’s not, it’s called ProWomanProLife. I advocate for the position that being pro-life is very pro-woman. This leads to a quizzical and concerned silence. At that point I usually wish I had a home decorating blog. Or perhaps a cake baking blog. There’s a blog for everything, and I could certainly use some advice on how to successfully create these for an upcoming baby shower I’m planning.)

I digress. Where was I? Abortion doesn’t normally come up very often. When it does, or if it does, take a casual poll of whether people know it’s legal all nine months in Canada, and I will bet all 14 dollars of my savings on the fact that no one will, and they will be aghast. Try it and let me know how it goes.

Comments

That is nuts. I had no idea that it was legal all the way to nine months. I recently started dating a lovely American girl, and the other day I mentioned how there isn’t a single political party that is pro-life in Canada. She was blown away. It is disheartening how abortion has become so entrenched, so quickly.

I’m quite ignorant of canadian law regarding abortion myself. Most of the people I debate it with are in the US, so I’m very familiar with the law of that country. But not Canada.

What about local and regional laws? The situation in the US is that state law often places rather unusual restrictions intending to work around court precidents, things like manditory warnings and ultrasounds with waiting periods, extensive identity checks, deliberatly excessive safety requirements… basically laws that recognise that abortion has to be legal so long as Roe v Wade stands, but seek to make it as difficult and expensive as possible. Does Canada have anything like that?

I once blogged about something very similar: that no-one in the UK knows that it’s legal all nine months in the USA, which causes the British to think that American pro-lifers are all extremist nutters. When I wrote that piece, though, I had no idea the situation was the same in Canada.

One of the commenters to my blog said:you’re absolutely right, I’m British and I had no idea that it’s legal in the USA to abort at the ninth month for non-medical reasons. … I am stunned, I really had no idea. I feel like asking a few other people, “did you know this…?”

In my experience, that’s everyone’s reaction. People who think they’re pro-abortion learn what the American law is and react with disgust, horror, and amazement — and usually use the word “infanticide”.

Suricou Raven: No, there’s nothing like that in Canada. All criminal law is federal here. Provinces can decide whether or not to fund abortions, or whether or not to fund them in out-of-hospital clinics. PEI has no abortion providers, but this is an issue of demography: it’s got a tiny population, it skews more conservative than other parts of the country, and low demand crossed with very few obstetricians full stop, let alone obstetricians who do abortions, is the reason, rather than deliberate government policy.

The trend has been for provinces to expand funding, though. In Winnipeg, for example, the Morgentaler Clinic provided abortions paid for by the user, because policy was not to cover abortions (or some other procedures, such as some sports injury treatments) carried out outside hospitals. The Clinic (and also a sports injury clinic) were subsequently bought by the regional health authority, and now operate essentially identically except that the funding comes from the provincial health ministry rather than the patient.

So the short answer: no, there is nothing at all that regions or cities can do, and very little provinces can do, to prevent or reduce abortions, other than declining to pay for them, and very few provinces are even doing that.

As I understand it, in the US it isn’t technically legal to abort in the second or third trimester for non-medical reasons in all states… it’s more that the definition of medical reasons is so broad as to be almost all-inclusive, and it isn’t at all difficult to find a doctor willing to sign the appropriate paperwork.

American pro-choicers tend to defend abortion right up to the point of birth not because they agree with it, but because they fear that to make even the slightest concession may create the legal opening that pro-lifers need to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Due to the polarising nature of the issue and the dependence on case law, it could easily be an all-or-nothing situation.

SR: “it’s more that the definition of medical reasons is so broad as to be almost all-inclusive, and it isn’t at all difficult to find a doctor willing to sign the appropriate paperwork.”
Yes, I agree. And this is why some pro-lifers tend to be wary of exemptions for medical necessity: I don’t know a single pro-life advocate who would never condone abortion, in for instance a situation where the pregnancy continuing would kill both the mother and the baby, while an abortion would save the mother’s life. Their fear is that the slightest concession to medical necessity already does create the legal opening that pro-choicers are using to impose an anything-goes situation on abortion. As long as there are doctors who interpret “I don’t want to have this baby” as a condition that can cause harm to the mother if the baby isn’t aborted, you’ll find pro-lifers very skeptical about the idea that only “medically necessary” abortions will be permitted/state funded/done in public hospitals and so on.

Suricou Raven: In the USA, according to R.v W, abortions must be legal until “viability” (typically understood to be 24-28 weeks gestation although some earlier premature children have survived and even thrived). After that, individual states have some discretion to limit abortions. While 2nd-trimester abortions are common, 3rd trimester abortions make up only about 1.1% of abortions (which is still over 10,000 a year). One of the reasons that the late Dr. Tiller was such a lightening rod for pro-lifer activism was that he was one of a very small number of doctors in the USA who was willing to perform very late-term abortions and he lived in one of the few states that allowed them for reasons other that to save a woman’s life.

Interestingly, the majority of countries in which abortion is legal impose gestational restrictions and have not seen a slide toward a complete ban on abortion (France, Denmark, Greece, and Norway all limit abortion to the 12th week of pregnancy; many other countries have limits of 13-18 weeks).

I suspect that if earlier gestational limits were imposed in the US, a great deal of the abortion controversy would dissipate. It wouldn’t appease hardcore pro-lifers (including me) OR hardcore pro-choicers, but it would mollify the majority of people who are somewhere in the middle.